Tech notes and reviews about quadcopters

Menu

Tag Archives: video

If you, like me, were tempted to Download DaVinci Resolve “free”* for Linux. Be aware that when you add folders to your media library, you won’t see your videos encoded in h.264 (which is the most used format).

I wanted to quickly try this video editor on Ubuntu 17.04 and I was highly disappointed not to be able to import any of my DJI drone videos. What’s the point of having a powerful professional editor that doesn’t even natively open any of my videos, while other open source editors like kdenlive, openshot can easily open? And no, I don’t want to convert my videos in a different format, just to open them in DaVinci.

Uninstall instructions

Also I struggled to find a way to uninstall this software, so here the instructions if you want to clean your hard drive after a disappointment similar to mine:

YouTube Timelapse vs. Microsoft Hyperlapse. Which one is best for you?

This article shows you how to edit in an easy way, with an easy program, your videos you collected and didn’t dare yet to post, maybe because you have no time for cutting, or simply you don’t find them interesting enough.

During the skiing season I’ve seen many people wearing a GoPro over their helmet. Yet I search information about slopes on youtube and I hardly find videos about the slopes.

I think that sharing is caring: if you film something you can easily cut it and publish a video on youtube. Your videos can potentially help other people who haven’t been in the same place and would like to see something from the first person perspective.

In this little guide I show you how to publish some videos, without losing too much time. Because cutting a nice video can take really a huge amount of your free time, which for some of you is a no-go.

[This article is still work in progress. Please come back for updates or at least don’t complain that it’s incomplete. I wanted to publish fast some of my experiments and then add more in my free time.]

GoPro Studio

Recently a friend of mine, also owning a GoPro, told me that he uses GoPro Studio to edit his videos. Go Pro Studio is easy to use and available for free and it’s available for both Windows and for Mac. Here an introduction on how GoPro Studio works.

Step 1: View & Trim

You have to import your gopro videos (it won’t make a copy, it just open them), you have to convert them before you can actually do something with them. In the Advanced Settings you can choose “High Quality” and select AVI/MOV (it doesn’t really matter which format you choose. It’s just a container and the resulting file will wight the same), as well as defining where to save them. You can also resize them, change frame rate, remove fish eye effect and speed them up.

Step 2: Edit

When your videos are converted you can select them and add them in a timeline (like iMovie or Final Cut) and cut them further. You can add also the same video multiple times if you wanna cut some parts in it. Final Cut is better for this. But say you wanna just cut a bit of the beginning and a bit of the end, it’s very practical.

Step 3: Export

Here you can select some presets for exporting. The one I use most of the time is YouTube. You can also select “Custom” and define what you want.

What you can do with GoPro Studio: add videos, select beginning and end, add a fade in and fade out effect,

What it missing: transition effects (Final Cut Pro X has a collection of much better and nicer transition effects). When you add multiple videos in your timeline, gopro studio connects them with a “+”, which means no transition effect. If you click that “+” it creates a default transition effect that sometimes you may not like.

Example/test of video lightly edited and exported with GoPro Studio

As reference, see screenshots above.

My source GoPro file: 1.54 GB. 1080p, 50 fps. I did this video by wearing the GoPro head strap. Probably it would have been better to use the bike mount for GoPro but I didn’t have it (if you buy such accessories from Banggood.com instead of buying the originals from gopro, you save a bunch of money).

In Step 1 I opened it with GoPro Studio and in the Step 1 I added it to my conversion list, then I clicked convert. 1-2 minutes later the file was ready. The resulting file can’t be opened with VLC. It’s an intermediary file for GoPro Studio and the AVI weights 10.8 GB.

In Step 2 I chose the standard blank template, then I dragged 2 times the same video in the timeline. Then I selected the beginning/ending for the 1st video and n the playback pane I set a fade in effect of 1.5 seconds. I selected a nice 5 seconds ending for the 2nd video and finally added a fade out effect. This process, without counting the waiting of the conversion, costed me around 5 minutes (I didn’t want to lose too much time).

In Step 3 I exported the video, leaving “YouTube” the default option, and finally published it on YouTube. I got an MP4 file weighting 419 MB.

Then I went to my YouTube channel and uploaded it. Here the result:

Attempt 1) original

As you can see, the video is long (7 minutes of boring biking in the city of Zurich) and it’s even shaky. In a few words: it sucks. If you publish a sucking video like this, please at least put in the description -in the 1st sentence- that its boring so at least you save yourself from many bad comments. Actually you can even disable comments, even better 😉

How to make a boring video a bit more interesting in YouTube

As initially promised, I’ll revel a few tricks to enhance a video that sucks. Actually YouTube helps doing so.

Attempt 2) YouTube stabilized

YouTube can detect a shaky video and stabilize it. I abbreviate Stabilize with “s” in my videos, for reference. I also save the enhancement as a new video, so I can keep the original for comparison purposes, or enhance it later with different options.

As you can see, the video is still boring because it’s damn long. Who will lose 7 minutes of his life to watch this, unless really interested in this particular route by bike and its dangers?

Attempt 3) YouTube stabilized and Timelapse 2x

I was thinking, to save people’s time I could speed up the video. I actually tried directly 4x but here you can see the result 2x:

The video is a bit faster, but still too slow and still boring. But at least it suck a bit less, which means we are going to the right direction.

Attempt 4) YouTube stabilized and Timelapse 4x

Personally I was quite happy with this result. 4x makes the video look like a race in the city and it’s quite fun (and funny) to watch. You can put probably something like a Charlie Chaplin movie song, or one of these funny piano tunes to make it really look funny. Since I had no time I skipped the music. I guess that for the music it’s personal taste: often I watch videos while ‘m already listening my music, in that case I always have to turn the youtube audio off, but that’s me, obviously a video with a cool soundtrack is nice. Be careful: most of the “cool songs” are copyrighted, so if you make a really cool movie with lots of views you can’t even monetize it because you are using copyrighted material. So better keep it silent and the copyrights are all yours.

Attempt 4 b) YouTube stabilized and Timelapse 6x

I did this video for just for testing and comparison purposes after generating the hyperlapse videos (see next chapter). I guess 6x would make sense on a boat or on a plane or so… for this video it’s too fast. 4x for me was the perfect result.

Conclusion

Without being an expert in cutting videos and without a big amount of time I managed to generate 1 video, upload it on youtube, then try a few options. The most valuable one is for sure the stabilize option combined with Timelapse. I had to try different timelapse speeds and in a total of 3 attempts after uploading the original I managed to get a decent video.

Be careful, the stabilize option alone can give you weird results. Here an example:

Crap Sogn Gion, Pise 49 (stabilized)

As you can see, in this video the stabilization creates some weirdness… see some zoom-in and zoom-outs during the video? Or the sky moving strangely?

Crap Sogn Gion, Pise 49 (original)

…and the original shaky version is not better 😉

Crap Sogn Gion, Pise 49 (stabilized, Timelapse 2x)

Wih 2x timelapse the weridness in the sky doesn’t go away. It’s still there but faster. Also in skiing note if you do many turns the video will be always boring anyway, with the timelapse, turns look even faster, thus if you are like my wanna vomit by watching the video if the turns are too fast 🙂

Crap Sogn Gion, Pise 49 (stabilized, Timelapse 4x)

Skiing in timelapse 4x is too damn fast, I don’t like it at all. See what I mean that it always depends on the kind of video you have? Biking in the city, 4s was ok, but not for skiing.

Note about YouTube

Please add accurate meta information in your videos, at least a few tags that make sense. In English and/or in your native language. Add also a description. If you feel like sharing the location, do that too. Finally if your video gets many views you can even get some money for your work by monetizing them with skippable ads or overlay ones. I prefer skippable ads so at least I don’t need still to close the various overlays during the video. I hate those.

How to make a video more interesting with Hyperlapse

I was waiting since a long time the availability of the Hyperlapse software for the public. You can apply as tester for the Android app, get the Windows phone app or download the Windows Preview release here: Microsoft Hyperlapse.

Unluckily, the Hyperlapse editor doesn’t allow to put together more than 1 clip so I just took my initial GoPro file and cut the beginning and the end, without adding myself in the end as I did in my first GoPro Studio cut.

Another limitation of Hyperlapse for Windows is that it’s adding a watermark in your bottom right part of your videos. I searched some forums and this happens because it’s in Preview release. I believe they do it to advertize this new amazing technology and probably they want to sell the software. Let’s see…

In Hyperlapse I opened my 419 MB file exported by GoProStudio. By default the timelapse is set to 8x, so I just tested it with the advanced option. The result is quite an OK video: too fast, but somehow it doesn’t look like a crazy race/funny like in the normal timelapse 4x, so hyperlapse can be a good option if you don’t want your video to look too funny. Also it’s quite good to speed up a long video without losing too much. The file was a 56 MB MP4 and I could see some compression artifacts. Probably you won’t notice them in YouTube, because all youtube videos have compression artifacts…

Hyperlapse 8x, advanced

As previously said, not happy with the compression artifacts, I opened my initial high quality (hq) file recorded with the GoPro (1.54 GB) and tried to generate the timelapse using that one. The result had a much better quality, and the size was 203 MB. Here the final result:

Hyperlapse 8x, advanced (hq)

I wonder if you can tell that this video has a better quality than the previous, because YouTube applies a massive compression on your uploads, so for me they both show heavy compression… but I’ll upload the 203 MB file somewhere so you can see the file before being processed by youtube. Let me know what you think.

For the sake of comparison purposes, I generated also 4x and 6x:

Hyperlapse 4x, advanced (hq)

The 4x hyperlapse looks too slow for me, but maybe because I liked the 4x timelapse from youtube, which looks more frenetic (so this one in comparison looks slow). What do you think?

Hyperlapse 6x, advanced (hq)

I think that this 6x hyperlapse video is ok, fast but not too much, maybe the best of the hyperlapse series. The 8x is really too fast. What do you think?

Conclusion

If you read the entire article or at least clicked the various videos and checked my comment under each one of the, you get an idea on what I like and dislike. Objectively I can only say that depending on your time availability, your computer type (e.g. on a Mac Hyperlapse is not available yet) and the type of video you did (gopro mounbted on a bike, skiing, car, flying?) one technique could be better than the other. Just try them out and judge yourself.

What do you think? Which video is your favorite and why? Please comment!

Hope this articled helped a bit and made you want to publish some of your skiing videos one time or another. With hyperlapse, or timelapse, whatever. If you want you can share your results in the comments!